ABSTRACT
Sometimes described as an intellectual kingpin of our profession, library classification started to be seen as an area of academic studies only in the late nineteenth century. Quite aside from its practical day-to-day applications, the theory of the subject gradually began to attract international attention. S. R. Ranganathan wrote in the early 1950s that, by then, it had acquired all the features of a discipline (Ranganathan, 1951, p. 12). Furthermore, describing classification as a way of thinking systematically, he equated it with other highly developed academic disciplines such as mathematics, relating it to disciplines such as linguistics and philosophy (Ranganathan, 1962, p. 96). And, in 1975, another original thinker on the subject, Eric De Grolier, said that classification had come of age (De Grolier, 1975).
